SOI Table Wizard, New Tax Gap Report Released

For the next four months, the Internal Revenue Service's Statistics of Income Division will be testing a prototype SOI Table Wizard.

The tool will allow users to create their own custom tables from SOI tabulated data in the 1999 and 2000 Corporate Source Books. If adopted, data from other forms could eventually be added and the IRS is asking users to complete a survey providing feedback on the new feature.

The agency did warn that tables produced using the "Build Your Own Tables" function do not identify statistically weak cell estimates, estimates of $500 or less, or cells that have been combined to avoid disclosure of information about a specific corporation.These annotations are included in the "Predefined Corporation Source Book Tables" which are also accessible from the test site.

Separately, the IRS released a fact sheet on the issue of income and how to determine gross income for a small business or self-employed taxpayer. A later fact sheet will provide information about a factor contributing to underreported income and overstated expenses.

The sheets were developed out of a National Research Program reporting a compliance study of individual taxpayers for tax year 2001. The study involved random selection of about 46,000 returns for review. The largest component of the tax gap comes from unreported and underreported income, and the data suggested that more than $100 billion of the individual underreporting gap came from understated net business income.